Anar
Gul gestures to the body of her grandchild, who was allegedly
killed by a U.S. service member in Panjwai, Kandahar province
south of Kabul, Afghanistan, Sunday, March. 11, 2012.AP

BALANDI, Afghanistan (AP) — An American soldier
opened fire on villagers near his base in southern Afghanistan
Sunday and killed 16 civilians, according to President Hamid
Karzai, who called it an "assassination" and furiously
demanded an explanation from Washington.

Nine children and three women were among the dead.

The killing spree deepened a crisis between U.S. forces and their
Afghan hosts over Americans burning Muslim holy books on a base
in Afghanistan last month. The burnings sparked weeks of violent
protests and attacks that left some 30 dead. Six U.S. service
members have been killed by their Afghan colleagues since the
Quran burnings came to light, and the violence had just started
to calm down.

"This is an assassination, an intentional killing of innocent
civilians and cannot be forgiven," Karzai said in a statement. He
said he has repeatedly demanded the U.S. stop killing Afghan
civilians.

President Barack Obama called the attack
"tragic and shocking" and offered his condolences to the families
of those killed. In a statement released by the White House, he
vowed "to get the facts as quickly as possible and to hold
accountable anyone responsible."

An
Afghan youth mourns for relatives, who were allegedly killed by a
U.S. service member in Panjwai, Kandahar province south of Kabul,
Afghanistan, Sunday, March. 11, 2012. A U.S. service member
walked out of a base in southern Afghanistan before dawn Sunday
and started shooting Afghan civilians, according to villagers and
Afghan and NATO officials.AP

The violence over the Quran burnings had already spurred calls in
the U.S. for a faster exit strategy from the 10-year-old Afghan
war. Obama even said recently that "now is the time for us to
transition." But he also said he had no plan to change the
current timetable that has Afghans taking control of security
countrywide by the end of 2014.

In the wake of the Quran burnings, the top U.S. commander in
Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen, visited troops at a base that was
attacked last month and urged them not to give in to the impulse
for revenge.

The tensions between the two countries had appeared to be easing
as recently as Friday, when the U.S. and Afghan governments
signed a memorandum of understanding about the transfer of Afghan
detainees to Afghan control — a key step toward an eventual
strategic partnership to govern U.S. forces in the country.

Sunday's shooting could push that agreement further away.

"This is a fatal hammer blow on the U.S. military mission in
Afghanistan. Whatever sliver of trust and credibility we might
have had following the burnings of the Quran is now gone," said
David Cortright, the director of policy studies at Notre Dame's
Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and an advocate
for a quick withdrawal from Afghanistan.

"This may have been the act of a lone, deranged soldier. But the
people of Afghanistan will see it for what it was, a wanton
massacre of innocent civilians," Cortright said.

A man
sits in the back of a truck with the bodies of several men and a
child allegedly killed by a U.S. service member in Panjwai,
Kandahar province south of Kabul, Afghanistan, Sunday, March 11,
2012.AP

The attack began around 3 a.m. in two villages in Panjwai, a
rural suburb of Kandahar and a traditional Taliban
stronghold where coalition forces have fought for control for
years. The villages — Balandi and Alkozai — are about 500 yards
(meters) from a U.S. base.

The gunman went into three houses and opened fire, said a
resident of Alkozai, Abdul Baqi, citing accounts from his
neighbors.

"When it was happening in the middle of the night, we were inside
our houses. I heard gunshots and then silence and then gunshots
again," Baqi said.

Eleven of those killed were members of one family, many of them
women and children.

An AP photographer saw 15 bodies in the two villages caught up in
the shooting. Some of the bodies had been burned, while others
were covered with blankets. A young boy partially wrapped in a
blanket was in the back of a minibus, dried blood crusted on his
face and pooled in his ear. His loose-fitting brown pants were
partly burned, revealing a leg charred by fire. It was unclear
how or why the bodies were burned.

Villagers packed inside the minibus looked on with concern as a
woman spoke to reporters. She pulled back a blanket to reveal the
body of a smaller child wearing what appeared to be red pajamas.
A third dead child lay in a pile of green blankets in the bed of
a truck.

Some villagers questioned whether a single soldier could have
killed so many people. But a U.S. official in Washington
said the American, an Army staff sergeant, was believed to have
acted alone and that initial reports indicated he returned to the
base after the shooting and turned himself in.

US
President Barack Obama, seen here on March 9, expressed deep
sadness Sunday at a "tragic and shocking" shooting incident in
Afghanistan, after a US soldier allegedly killed 16 civilians,
mostly women and children.AP

Five people were wounded in the pre-dawn attack in Kandahar
province, including a 15-year-old boy named Rafiullah who was
shot in the leg and spoke to Karzai over the telephone. He
described how the American soldier entered his house in the
middle of the night, woke up his family and began shooting them,
according to Karzai's statement.

NATO officials apologized for the shootings but did not confirm
that anyone was killed, referring instead to reports of deaths.

"This deeply appalling incident in no way represents the values
of ISAF and coalition troops or the abiding respect we feel for
the Afghan people," Allen said in a statement, using the
abbreviation for NATO's International Security Assistance Force.

He pledged a "rapid and thorough investigation" and vowed to
ensure that "anyone who is found to have committed wrongdoing is
held fully accountable."

NATO spokesman Justin Brockhoff said a U.S. service member had
been detained at a NATO base as the alleged shooter. The wounded
people were evacuated to NATO medical facilities, he added.

International forces have fought for control of Panjwai for years
as they've tried to subdue the Taliban in their rural
strongholds. The Taliban movement started just to the north of
Panjwai, and many of the militant group's senior leaders,
including chief Mullah Omar, were born, raised, fought or
preached in the area. Omar once ran an Islamic school in an area
of Panjwai that has since been carved into a new district.

Anar
Gul, right, is interviewed as she sits next to the body of her
grandson, allegedly killed by a U.S. service member in Panjwai,
Kandahar province south of Kabul, Afghanistan.AP

In addition to its symbolic significance, the district is an
important base for the Taliban to target the city of Kandahar to
the east. Panjwai was seen as key to securing Kandahar when U.S.
forces flooded the province as part of Obama's strategy to surge
in the south starting in 2009.

Twelve of the dead were from Balandi, said Samad Khan, a farmer
who lost all 11 members of his family, including women and
children. Khan was away from the village when the incident
occurred and returned to find his family members shot and burned.
One of his neighbors was also killed, he said.

"This is an anti-human and anti-Islamic act," said Khan. "Nobody
is allowed in any religion in the world to kill children and
women."

Khan and other villagers demanded that Karzai punish the American
shooter.

"Otherwise we will make a decision," said Khan. "He should be
handed over to us."

The four people killed in the village of Alkozai were all from
one family, said a female relative who was shouting in anger. She
did not give her name because of the conservative nature of local
society.

"No Taliban were here. No gunbattle was going on," said the
woman. "We don't know why this foreign soldier came and killed
our innocent family members. Either he was drunk or he was
enjoying killing civilians."

The
Taliban called the shootings the latest sign that
international forces are working against the Afghan people.

"The so-called American peace keepers have once again quenched
their thirst with the blood of innocent Afghan civilians in
Kandahar province," the Taliban said in a statement posted on a
website used by the insurgent group.

Karzai said he was sending a high-level delegation to
investigate.

U.S. forces have been implicated before in other violence in the
same area.

Four soldiers from a Stryker brigade out of Lewis-McChord,
Washington, have been sent to prison in connection with the 2010
killing of three unarmed men during patrols in Kandahar
province's Maiwand district, which is just northwest of Panjwai.
They were accused of forming a "kill team" that murdered Afghan
civilians for sport — slaughtering victims with grenades and
powerful machine guns during patrols, then dropping weapons near
their bodies to make them appear to have been combatants.

And in January, before the Quran burning incident, a video that
purportedly showed U.S. Marines urinating on corpses of men they
had killed sparked widespread outrage.

Obama has apologized for the Quran burnings and said they were a
mistake. The Qurans and other Islamic books were taken from a
detention facility and dumped in a burn pit last month because
they were believed to contain extremist messages or inscriptions.
A military official said at the time that it appeared detainees
were exchanging messages by making notations in the texts.